Grappling with questions of faith and God and life

A Time to Mourn (a response to John Piper and those who quote him)

The writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us that “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” I’m writing this on the Monday after the most terrible primary school massacre in American history, after a mentally ill young man went to his mother’s school, killed her, several adults, and at least twenty young children.

This is a time to mourn.

Not a time to score Calvinism points by hammering away about God’s sovereignty.

Not a time to remind us that this massacre is nothing compared to the greatest crime, the crucifixion of Jesus (which was also God’s plan from before the foundation of the world).

The same could be said for every pastor who cribbed yesterday’s sermon from Piper’s blog posts. We don’t need a lesson. We don’t need deflection away from this event onto an oversimplified, self-contradictory view of the crucifixion. We don’t need the decaf version of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

What do we need? Compassion. Space. The humility to admit that there isn’t an easy answer to this, no matter what the Reformed bloggers say.